‘It was a woman with a knife a few years back,’ Thorne said. ‘Or a man wearing a signet ring who punched me when I tried to arrest his brother. Or I ran into a coffee table when I was five.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Knife,’ she said. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’
‘You had a one-in-three chance.’
‘I should also tell you that it makes me a very good liar.’ She sat back, folded her arms. ‘And a shit-hot poker player.’
‘You kidding?’
‘It saved me having to work behind a bar when I was at college.’
Thorne nodded, genuinely impressed. She was certainly naïve, this girl, and gobby and over-exuberant.
But she kept on surprising him.
The look on Kate’s face when she opened the door gave Thorne the impression that she knew, or at least had a good idea, why he and Anna had come. She certainly did not appear overly shocked when he told her.
The three of them were in the living room and each tensed at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Donna came in drying her hair. Nobody had bothered to sit down.
‘What?’ she said.
Thorne ran through it all again for Donna’s benefit. Then he turned back to her girlfriend. ‘Julian Munro saw the tattoo, Kate,’ he said. ‘Not in any great detail, though I’m not convinced the name would have rung any bells with him anyway.’
‘It rang quite a bell with us, though,’ Anna said.
Kate’s hand moved to her neck, to the elaborate lettering that curled below the collar of her shirt. She nodded. ‘It was boiling that day,’ she said. ‘I remember the two of us sitting there sweating in that café and I had this stupid little vest on . . .’
Donna was just standing there, the towel dangling from her fist, the anger building to the point where it looked as though she might use it to strangle the woman she loved. ‘You saw Ellie? Why the hell didn’t you say anything? Why did you think it was any of your business?’ She shouted, furiously spitting out the questions one on top of the other, while Kate turned her face away and tried desperately to interject. ‘Why did you see her? Christ, why am I only hearing about this now?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘All that rubbish the other day, you swearing blind you were on my side. I was right, wasn’t I? About you being jealous. Were you trying to warn her off?’
‘No—’
‘Did you tell her I didn’t want to see her?’
‘God, no. Why would I want to do that?’
‘How the hell should I know? Because you’re sick in the head?’
‘You should try and calm down,’ Thorne said.
Donna wheeled around. ‘You can piss off as well. I can see how much you’re enjoying this.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
Donna turned to Anna, jabbing a finger in Thorne’s direction. ‘He fucking loves it, look at him.’
‘Why did you go to see Ellie, Kate?’ Thorne asked.
Kate stepped back until her calves were pressing against the sofa, then she dropped on to it. ‘Look, it was stupid,’ she said. ‘I knew that. But I also knew how much you were looking forward to seeing her. So when I got out, I just wanted to . . . I don’t know, pave the way or something. See if I could help.’
‘What did she say?’ Anna asked.
‘What the hell did you say?’ Donna marched across and stood above Kate; glaring down, demanding answers. ‘What did you say to my daughter? “You don’t know me, but I’ve been shagging your mother in prison for the last few years”?’
‘I told her I was a friend.’
‘Some fucking friend,’ Donna said.
Kate looked up at Thorne. ‘It didn’t go very well, OK? Like I said, it was stupid and I don’t really know what I was expecting.’
‘You didn’t hit it off, then?’ he asked.
‘I just freaked her out, I think.’
‘Julian Munro said you were arguing.’
‘It was a bad time for her, that’s all. She was waiting for her exam results and was all stressed out about it. She got upset, and . . . Look, it was just bad timing, OK?’
‘That was the last time you saw her?’
Kate nodded.
‘You never saw Ellie Langford again after that meeting in the café in Cobham?’
‘No, that was it,’ Kate said. ‘It was only a few weeks later that she went missing.’
Donna suddenly swung the towel violently, slapping it hard against the cushion next to Kate, who flinched when it came down. ‘I cried on your shoulder. When you came to visit, the day after I’d heard about Ellie disappearing. I cried like a baby and you just sat there. You’d seen her, and you just sat there and said nothing.’
‘You know why I’m asking, Kate,’ Thorne said. ‘Why I have to ask?’
Anna looked at him, her lack of understanding obvious. Thorne continued to stare at Kate.
‘The girl you killed was about the same age as Ellie, wasn’t she?’
Kate’s eyes met Thorne’s, something desperate in them now. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘That was a case of bad timing too, wasn’t it?’
‘You’re out of order.’
‘Someone else who didn’t react the way you were expecting.’
‘It was nearly twenty years ago.’
‘What were you and Ellie arguing about?’
Kate looked up at Donna, leaned towards her and clutched at the wet towel as though her life depended on it. ‘Don, you’re not taking any of this shit seriously, are you? You’re not listening to this, right? Ellie just disappeared, I swear.’ She pulled on the towel, but Donna stood firm, her knuckles as white as the cotton, her eyes fixed on the floor. ‘Tell them, will you? Tell them this is out of order, Don, for Christ’s sake . . .’ *
‘She killed someone?’
Thorne nodded, walking quickly away from the front door that Donna had slammed behind them. ‘Like she said, we’re talking almost twenty years ago. She was only a teenager.’
‘Who was it?’ Anna asked.
‘A girl she was in love with who was already involved with someone else.’ Thorne had looked up Katharine Mary Campbell’s record after his first visit to Donna’s flat. ‘Kate hit her more than twenty times with a lump hammer.’
‘Jesus . . .’
They could still hear the shouting from inside the house as they reached the car.
‘So, what do you reckon?’ Thorne asked. ‘Is she lying?’
‘God knows,’ Anna said. ‘Ever since this whole thing kicked off, I’ve started to think that almost everybody’s lying about something.’
Thorne opened the car door. ‘Now you’re starting to think like a detective,’ he said.
NINETEEN
Thorne and Louise walked down into Camden and mooched around the market, as busy as any other Sunday morning, despite the near-freezing temperature and the threat of rain. Although Louise still spent an evening or two a week at her own flat in Pimlico, they had been talking vaguely about doing up Thorne’s place a bit and she was on the lookout for decorating and design ideas.
‘Something a bit more colourful,’ she’d said. ‘Something funky.’
As it was, nothing caught her eye and anything approaching a purpose was quickly forgotten. They trudged around aimlessly for the best part of two hours while Thorne moaned about being cold, ate freshly made doughnuts from a stall near Dingwalls, then walked up towards Chalk Farm to meet Phil Hendricks for lunch.
As close as he and Hendricks were, a few months ago Thorne might have resented his friend’s presence – the intrusion on a few precious hours alone with his girlfriend. He could not recall which of them had made this particular arrangement, but it hardly mattered. He did not feel the same way any more and seriously doubted that Louise did, either.
They ate mussels and chips at Belgo and drank bizarrely named Belgian lagers: Satan Gold, Slag and a sickly concoction called Mongozo Banana, which Louise could not finish. Hendricks was happy to help her out. He
thought it was hilarious that some of the most lethal-sounding ales were brewed by Trappist monks.
‘I bet they’ve got plenty to say after a few pints of that,’ he said, dipping a chip into a pot of mayonnaise. ‘They must at least manage “I love you, you’re my best mate.”’
‘Or be able to ask where the nearest kebab shop is,’ Thorne said.
‘Trust me, they get up to all sorts inside those monasteries with gallons of free beer knocking around. Maybe they can’t speak because their mouths are full . . .’
Hendricks was on fine form and the three of them laughed a lot. He talked about some of his fellow pathologists – ‘humourless morons’ – and the boyfriend situation – ‘deader than the buggers on my slab’. He seemed to sense that Thorne and Louise were desperate for the company and the entertainment, that both were going through stressful periods at work and that things weren’t a whole lot better at home.
When Louise was in the toilet, Hendricks asked Thorne how things were going. Work had been off limits all day and it was clear that he was not talking about Adam Chambers or Alan Langford.
‘I think I’m getting on her nerves,’ Thorne said. He looked at Hendricks and saw that his friend was not quite buying it. ‘We’re getting on each other’s nerves.’
‘You should try and get away,’ Hendricks said. ‘First chance you have.’
‘Right, so we can get on each other’s nerves somewhere a bit warmer.’
‘It’s about spending some decent time together, that’s all.’
‘Maybe . . .’
‘You should do something about the living arrangements. Make it more official or whatever.’
‘Have you written that best-man speech already?’
‘I’m just saying, maybe Lou should get rid of her flat. Or you could sell both places and get somewhere bigger.’
They had been considering both of these options before Louise had lost the baby. But like a great many other things, changing their living arrangements had become something associated with the pregnancy, and, as such, was no longer talked about.
‘It’s just a blip, mate,’ Hendricks said.
Thorne looked up and saw Louise walking back from the toilets. She looked tired and distracted, in no great hurry to return to the table, and Thorne suddenly understood the unconscious association he had been making in his head over the last two days. He pictured Louise sitting in her silver Megane, parked up somewhere and crying her heart out.
He thought: It’s me.
Something she was stuck with or settling for.
A blip.
Hendricks leaned across the table. Said, ‘My best-man speech would be hilarious . . .’
After lunch, they returned to the market and while Hendricks and Louise wandered in and out of vintage clothing shops and looked at retro furniture, Thorne walked back up the main road to the Electric Ballroom in search of second-hand CDs.
He browsed for a few minutes, then sent a text to Anna Carpenter: the series is called ‘lie to me’ and the actor is tim roth!
He was looking at the track listing on an Alison Krauss compilation when she called him back.
‘You’re a genius,’ she said. ‘That’s really been annoying me.’
‘I meant to tell you yesterday.’
‘Listen, there’s this pub quiz which a few of us go to on a Sunday night. I wondered if you fancied it.’
‘A quiz?’
‘It’s a good laugh and we could do with you on the team, to be honest.’
Thorne stood to one side so that a fellow browser could flick through the box of Johnny Cash bootlegs. ‘Sounds a damn sight more fun than paperwork, but I’ve got a ton of stuff I need to catch up on before tomorrow.’
‘Come on! Two free pints for each member of the winning team.’
‘I’d be rubbish anyway,’ Thorne said. ‘If it isn’t music, football or obscure TV shows.’
‘There’s always stuff like that, and anyway it doesn’t really matter if you don’t know the answers. It’s just a good night out.’
‘I’d better not.’
‘OK, well, call if you change your mind.’
Thorne said he would and with fifteen minutes to kill until he was due to meet Louise and Phil, he went back to the CD racks. He wondered why the conversation had made him so nervous, and if Anna was quite as good at spotting lies as she thought she was.
He had no paperwork to do. And he’d looked up the actor’s name on Google.
On Fridays, if he fancied a night on the town, he would see Candela or one of his other girls. But Saturday night was usually reserved for the boys. The previous night, he and a few of the lads had taken one of the boats, motored out a mile or so on a calm sea, then dropped the anchor. Somebody had brought along a decent-sized bag of charlie, which got the party started, and they did a bit of business and necked red wine until nobody could talk sensibly about anything.
So, as was often the case, Sunday morning meant a long lie-in. Once he was vertical, a stumble on to the patio to drink tea and listen to one of the English-speaking radio stations. Then, when he was starting to feel vaguely human again, he stretched out by the pool to sweat out the over-indulgences of the night before.
He flicked through El Sur in English, a free newspaper that was delivered every week. There were details of a foiled ETA jailbreak on the front page, a few familiar faces in the local news section, but nothing that really grabbed his interest. Later, he would drive down to pick up the overseas editions of the Mail on Sunday and the News of the World. He missed the supplements, but enjoyed catching up with the sport and doing the crosswords.
He had books of crosswords and sudoku in every bog in the place; they kept his mind sharp.
The breeze made reading the newspaper tricky, so he reached for a paperback that had been sitting beside his bed for several months, that he had picked up at the airport on his last trip across to North Africa. It claimed to be a ‘gritty gangland thriller’ and promised to ‘pull no punches’. It sounded like just the thing to take his mind off what was happening in the real world.
He needed a laugh.
It was the same with most of the films. All that million-miles-an-hour geezer-garbage the bloke who used to be shacked up with Madonna churned out. Gangster chic, or whatever they called it.
Gangster shit, more like.
He supposed it was entertaining enough, if that’s what you were looking for, and it certainly gave him and the lads a few good giggles. But it was about as true to life as Lord of the effing Rings . . .
The book was much as he expected – sharp suits and sawn-offs – at least those few pages he read before the words began to blur and he felt himself drifting away. He flattened the sunlounger and pulled the towel over his head. There was an old Rolling Stones song on the radio and the sucker-thing slurped and ticked as it hoovered the bottom of the pool, and when he woke up an hour later, his head was thumping.
He kept the towel on his face and lay still. He was desperate for something to drink but unwilling to get up and walk to the kitchen, or even shout through to the maid who was pottering around inside. It was hot and white behind his eyes, the sweat was slick on him, and the worry turned to anger as the sun crept higher in the sky. His mood became sour and murderous when he thought about what was happening, the moves he was being forced to make.
So much trouble over a few poxy snaps . . .
Somebody had it in for him, that was clear enough, but finding out who might not be so straightforward. So, as well as trying to sort things out back in the UK, he’d put the word out locally. There were a few in the frame: a town councillor he’d maybe squeezed a little too hard; a Moroccan supplier who thought he was being underpaid; a jumped-up used-car dealer from the Midlands who’d arrived six months before and had been put in his place when he’d tried to throw his weight about. There were those, and more than a few others who might have resented his closeness to their wives and girlfriends. Any one of them could have sent th
e pictures, stirred up trouble.
Of course, it would help if he could see the bloody photographs. Then he might have a better idea about who was playing silly buggers. One way or another, he’d find out eventually and get it sorted, but until then it was all about damage limitation.
Fortunately, he’d always been good at that.
He tried his book again, but it got no better, then deciding the paperback was good and heavy if nothing else, he hurled it at the sliding doors as hard as he could. It thumped against the glass and dropped to the deck. He lay there watching as a few of the scattered pages were picked up by the breeze and blown towards the water.
They bought cakes from a patisserie on Camden Parkway and took them back to Thorne’s flat. Louise dug out a teapot from somewhere and poured milk into a jug, despite Thorne’s curmudgeonly protestations that hot soup and toasted crumpets would have been more suitable, considering the testicle-free brass monkeys that were knocking about.
Hendricks told Thorne he was a soft southern bastard. Thorne ignored him. Louise only took issue with ‘soft’.
Once tea was done with, the wine came out and they sat and drank as the Sunday evening doldrums kicked in early. The light faded outside, and when the conversation turned equally dark, Louise announced that she was going to have a bath.
Thorne opened another bottle. ‘I should have worked harder at school.’
‘You what?’
‘Got enough qualifications to go to university. Got myself a job that didn’t make me feel like this quite as much.’
‘I shouldn’t worry about it,’ Hendricks said. ‘I doubt you were bright enough anyway.’ He smiled, raised his glass. ‘This is almost certainly all you’re fit for.’
It was a trick Hendricks had used a good few times before. The banter and the piss-take as ways of easing Thorne out of a black mood. It worked more often than not, but tonight Hendricks had an uphill struggle, and Thorne told him so.
‘Who said I was joking?’ Hendricks asked.
‘You’re probably right,’ Thorne said. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck it for so long otherwise.’
‘Maybe you need to move up.’
From the Dead Page 15
